Good morning. And I was hoping that before I started talking, I could make sure I got to know whoever was here, because I see some faces that I don't know, some that I do very well. So say names, and if you're from... What centenary are you from? Greta, Berkeley's Ancestor. Ramdi, Berkeley's Ancestor. Vika, Montreal's Ancestor. Stephanie, Berkeley's Ancestor. Barbara, Berkeley's Ancestor. Right here. Yeah, yeah, [...] yeah. Wendy, Floating Center, Sacrosanct.

[01:14]

No, you sit with Auntie. Yes. Rosie, DDT. Claire, DDT. Rhea, Junko Bag, Junko Bag, Arizona. Shelly, DDT. Elizabeth, Laura, Represents Center. Bethany, Represents Center. Sherry, Represents Center. Christine, Norma Isen, Center. Andrea, Berkley. Leslie, Berkley. Lori, Berkley. Susan, Berkley. Anna, I already have found a visiting Catholic Church in San Francisco. And how did you come to be here today? I used to live in the Endgates Inn Center in the 70s. And have you been coming to Berkley's Inn Center for... And I'm Grace, and this is my home temple, and I also have established Emptiness Zen Do in North Fork, and in Modesto, Valley Heartland Zen Group, and in Fresno, Fresno River Group.

[02:34]

So it's always fun for me to come back home. This morning, I wanted to talk to you about what the reading is that I gave out before the retreat. How many of you read that reading? and the rest of you didn't see it at all, raise your hand if you didn't see it at all. Great. You know, there's a wonderful Sufi story about Nazruddin who goes to give a talk and he comes in to his congregation and says, how many of you know what I'm going to talk to you about today? And nobody raises their hand. He says, well, I can't speak to a group that's this ignorant. So he leaves. The next week he comes back and says, how many of you know what I'm going to talk to you about today? And everybody raises their hand.

[03:36]

He says, well, since you already know, I don't have to give the talk. So he leaves. The third week he comes back, and someone has been working on this koan, and so he says, how many of you know what it is I'm going to talk to you about today." And one person stands up and says, half of us do, and half of us don't. He said, well good, the half of you that do, tell the half of you that don't. So at various times I may refer to information that you don't know about, so the half of you that do, tell the other half that don't know. I wanted to talk to you about how I became interested, first of all, how I became interested in this subject of the convents and female ancestors. And then I'm going to talk to you a little bit, of course, about the subject matter, and then basically what it means to us in terms of incorporating this into our practice.

[04:37]

So first of all, I wanted to make a point about what we're doing, because if we wanted to just talk about women in power, we could go to any number of feminist meetings, particularly in Berkeley. Not that there's anything wrong with talking about this for its own sake, but that's not our function, and it's not the function of Berkeley Zen Center to just talk about women and women's rights. Actually, the importance of this has to do with practice and how we practice. So then again, we'll have Nazaruddin's question. How many of you know what it is we're doing in practice? Anybody know what we're doing in practice? bringing awareness to each moment.

[05:40]

Other thoughts? That's part of what we're doing. Yes? Liberation. Yes. We're bringing awareness to our moments so that we can become liberated, so we can become free of clinging to self. So this is kind of a difficult situation, being a woman in this male-dominated practice, because the more we look at being a woman, the more we're clinging to some definition of who we are, and it's very hard to let go of the self at the same time we're examining it. So this is a challenge. Yes? Well, aren't we also trying to fully embody this self? Yes. Please tell that to everyone. That's right. So in order for us to abandon the self that's been created through conditioning, and impulses, biological impulses, we first need to understand what it is that we're doing.

[06:43]

But let me just share with you what I think some of the best words are that try to describe this process that we're in of both letting go of this self that has been created through conditioning and through biological, well, through our hormones, for one example. Zen Buddhism does not recognize any authority outside of the true self. And our practice is discovering the life within the self that is connected to all things. So any limitations we put upon ourselves, whether it be by gender or personality or other factors, limits our sense of connectedness to oneness and our ability to fully embody ourselves. In Buddhism, or in Zazen, we let go of all these human thoughts and feelings. This is the foundation of our life.

[07:46]

And to talk about this matter of liberation, this is found in functioning day to day as a person, a role that is, in itself, the personified union of this moment and eternity. So this is a, when we talk about the personified union of this moment and eternity, what we're talking about is intimacy in this moment. Fully living without restrictions or definitions or other people's ideas about who we actually are that we've taken on. So in this way, we can begin to understand, this is by the way from Uchiyama Roshi's Opening the Hand of Thought. In this way, we can begin to see that we have a task, on the one hand, of letting go of this self that we've created through the information that we've been given about who we are, but just as much by what it means to be embodied as a human being with greed, hate, and delusion, and the particular flavors, the particular flavors of

[09:03]

what it means to be a woman. There's a wonderful new book that I just got a copy of just prior to coming here called The Female Brain. It's a very controversial book because it's been written by a doctor who specialized in studying the problems that women have on their life patterns caused by hormonal shifts. And she's received quite a lot of criticism because many women are afraid that as she begins to talk about and articulate differences in our actual brains, that this means we're lesser than. And it reminds me a lot of the problem that I had when I was working as a psychologist in Oakland. First of all, they had made rules that one couldn't use standardized testing because The so-called standardized testing were standardized on Caucasian children and didn't necessarily apply in the same way to children of different cultures.

[10:16]

So this created one problem and then what couldn't, as a psychologist and I was testing children, you couldn't use certain instruments to determine what was going on. So that was one problem. The second problem was It was impossible and I believe still is impossible to talk about what might be differences that transcend actually culture that actually go down to biology in the way children learn of different races. but it was impossible to talk about because it's so charged. So all these children are suffering who may have different learning styles because we can't talk about it. And it's been the same thing for women and the medical profession. So all of the experiments that have been done on moods and phases of development have been done on men because they can't use women because their cycles mess things up.

[11:18]

Hello. The cycles are actually reality for certain people. So we ought to know something about them. Just before we came in here for sitting, I was visiting with a couple people while I used the bathroom. And in this book, The Female Brain, the doctor takes two groups of teenagers, boys 15 and girls 15, so that she creates a safe environment and then says, okay, you get to ask a question of each other because you're so different. And boys ask the girls, why is it a bunch of you go to the bathroom at once to talk? And this is something that she worked on uncovering, actually, in her research. You know, this is fascinating. I could say, I'm very happy to see you all today, but that wouldn't give you the full flavor of that we actually get high on intimacy.

[12:23]

You know, there's been studies done now that she includes in her book. It used to be that when we talked about stress, it was built on the male model. When men come under stress, they want to kill somebody. In fact, it was very interesting. I was talking to a male priest, someone that I ordained, and said, okay, well, you'll be giving the talk, and you can expect so-and-so within that particular group to give you some very challenging questions. And without missing a beat, he said, I can take him. Now he was joking, but that was the immediate response where we might have some feeling like, how could so-and-so do that to me? Don't they like me? Why would they make my life harder? Aren't they going to be nice to me? You know, where we would be seeking this intimacy, this connectedness, this harmony. that this study of stress was based on men, and it came up with this idea of fight or flight, you know, the adrenaline that was released in this model that came up for fighting.

[13:31]

But actually, when someone did study what happened with women during stress, they found that oxytocin was released, which is the same hormone that's released during breastfeeding, and creates this wonderful feeling of intimacy. so that rather than the fight-or-flight response in women, we have something which they've called the tend and befriend, so that you might start cleaning your house, you'll call up your friends on the phone when you're feeling upset about something, and you'll try to talk So this is something that she has really examined and that I wanted to talk about before I talk about the women in particular, is the ways that we're conditioned biologically, which isn't to say that these are negative things or lesser things than, in fact, we might, as she said, when men read this book, they will develop brain envy. As some of you know, and you can tell the others, that Freud predicted that women had penis envy.

[14:35]

But in this case, she says they have brain envy. It's not as if we all start with the same brain structure. Males and females' brains are different by nature. Think about this. What if the communication center is bigger in one brain than in the other? What if the emotional memory center is bigger in one than the other? What if one brain develops a greater ability to read cues in people than the other? In this case, you would have a person whose reality dictated that communication, connection, emotional sensitivity, and responsiveness were primary values. This person would prize these qualities above all others and be baffled by a person with a brain that didn't grasp the importance of these qualities. In essence, you would have someone with a female brain. So let's just say a little bit more about how that happens. Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female.

[15:37]

Female is nature's default gender setting. If you were to watch a female and a male brain developing via time-lapse photography, you would see their circuit diagrams being laid down according to the blueprint drafted by both genes and sex hormones. A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week for men will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers. If the testosterone surge doesn't happen, the female brain continues to grow unperturbed. The fetal girl's brain cells sprout more connections in the communication centers in areas that process emotion. How does this fetal fork in the road affect us? For one thing, because of her larger communication center, this girl will grow up to be more talkative than her brother.

[16:41]

Men use about 7,000 words per day. Women use about 20,000. For another reason, it defines our innate biological destiny, coloring the lens through which each of us views and engages the world. So if we know these things about ourselves, if we know how, and she goes on to talk about specifically how various combinations of hormones actually make us high. And I just had a great opportunity to experience this. I've taken care of my grandchildren for a week while their parents went off on vacation. And the 18-month-old, who calls me Buma, actually, she can't say Buma yet, so it sounds more like Mooma. But I'm the one feeding her, and since I just had some teeth pulled, I actually made some baby food out of various things to eat.

[17:44]

So she eats my food, and she loves it. It's very tasty. And I'm the one that's changing her and paying attention to her and putting her down for naps. So not too long into the day, if I was just out of eyesight, I would hear a little voice, Mama, Mama, and I would need to answer her and say, yes, I'm right here with you. And that sense of connectedness is so strong and gets us so happy. And then I thought, oh, how can I leave her tomorrow, you know? But we know that we have this, and yet we need to work with it. I mean, what happened for me was my first awareness of this was I had wanted more children. I'm one of these people that's really high around children. And so I had wanted more children, but my husband was like, no. We had two boys and they were a little more than two and a half years apart. No. And about the time the youngest one was 10, he said to me, maybe, you know, we could have more kids.

[18:48]

And I went, no. And the reason I said no at that point was that I understood that I had some bigger questions to answer and that having children, at least for me, was instant meaning. you know, this sense of connectedness and the sense of well-being we get from nurturing is profound and biologically determined. And so if I had that going on, I really wouldn't get to these questions that I had begun to ask in my own Zen practice. So I told you the question that the boys asked the girls, which is, why do you go to the bathroom? A bunch of you didn't talk there. And the question the girls asked the boys, I thought this was very bold for 15-year-olds, was, do you like girls with short hair or long hair? But we weren't talking about hair on the head. Sometimes we might need to turn that off. And we were talking about, they were talking about pubic hair.

[19:52]

And the doctor was a little surprised at the boldness and out frontness of the girls. And the boys said, we like girls with none. Meaning, all we want is the organ itself. We're not really interested in anything else. So, one of the things that has been uncovered about the differences between the genders is that, on average, the male of our species has a sexual thought every 52 seconds. Whereas most women might think about sex one to four times a day if you're really hot-blooded. It might be a little more than four times a day. But if we think that they're having sexual thoughts every 52 seconds, we have to bow down to them. They're doing really well. They're doing really well. with that kind of programming, biological programming.

[20:55]

So, they have their own issues to work on, and our practice has been mostly developed to help them work on those issues. But we have different issues, and the ideas that we might conclude about, conclusions we might come to thinking about the differences is, these ideas are things like, Might we stay in an abusive relationship too long, you know, trying to come to harmony because we want that high from our hormones, because we're so tuned to the sensitivity, we want this harmony. Might we do that within our own Zen practice, even though we're not getting our needs met? Might we stay with a teacher too long just because we're trying to work this out? might we try to get the teacher to like us, to be the perfect little Zen student, rather than to become and embody our true self?

[22:04]

Because we're looking for this approval, you know, we're scanning the face, we're listening to the tones, we're picking up the most subtle things. So there are all kinds of implications for what these differences mean. And for myself, as I was saying earlier, the reason I became interested in this was not because I had a particular interest in feminism as a woman, it was because I became a priest and I had a male teacher and I had no knowledge, whatever, of how to embody this role. Now some of you who have female teachers may also have questions in this area because the female teachers we have in America did not come out of a female lineage, they came out of a male lineage. So they have no knowledge of how women actually embodied the role of Zen teacher and how they practiced together. So this was kind of a question for me.

[23:07]

And I found myself wandering around in Japan, sort of going to women's temples and trying to get some feeling for this. And then my own karmic destiny as a grandmother and my own interest merged in the year 2000 when I got my first grandson. And instead of going to Japan for my studies, I stayed in on Mother's Day, there was this wonderful workshop at San Francisco's Ed Center where scholars came and talked about female ancestors. And I said, oh, well that's what I've been doing, but I didn't realize anybody else was interested in this. And I didn't know that it mattered to anybody else, but there was a room full of women that it really mattered to. Additionally at that I met Professor Miriam Levering, who is the mother of all the research that's been done on female ancestors.

[24:09]

And when I met her, I had the experience, which I've come to really trust at this point in my life, I really need to study with this person. And so, I approached her and said, after the conference, I want to know what you know. I want to learn what you've learned. And I don't know how to do that. You know, I'm not going to go back to school, but can I come see you in Tennessee?" And she said, yes. And I said, well, that's fine. I'll stay in a hotel, but I want to spend time with you and, you know, get a data dump and find out what it is you've been doing these years. She said, oh, no, you can stay with me. So this wonderful relationship developed. And I really encourage you to turn on your antenna in that way. that when something comes up in your life like that, you know, I had this experience when I was in Japan and met a Rinzai teacher there and just said, I have to study with this person. I don't know why.

[25:10]

And later I found out why. But when that comes up for you, that you put things aside, you know, what's your usual, habitual things that you have to take care of your work and your studies and all your family responsibilities and say, this matters. this really matters. So that's how things proceeded for me and I have since then had really an amazing number of experiences where the female ancestors kind of would grab me and pull me around and say, look over here and actually have found things out that scholars didn't know about even though I can't read or read Chinese or Japanese. I can speak a little Japanese, but I can't read either language. And so I have said to Professor Levering that, Miriam, I've said, well, I can't read, but I can fetch.

[26:11]

So I go over there and I find these temples and bring back things, and I can pay translators to translate them. And so I'll have a number of products, actually, that I'm selling today, because we do like to shop. That is part of our biology. But the money goes for financing these translations and so on. So I wanted to talk now a little bit about the way that Zen has revealed and hidden the women's lineage. And I don't think that there's any blame here, because all of the men who came to America, as I said in the newsletter article, All of the men who came to America to teach Westerners had all been trained in all-male monasteries, so they just didn't know. And when I first started studying this and offered workshops here at Berkeley Zen Center on this subject, I was surprised that some of the male senior students and so on didn't sign up.

[27:16]

And then I got into my feelings about it, you know, we have this big feeling base, you know, we have some feelings, hurt feelings about it. But the more I hung out there with those feelings, the more I realized, you know, they really love Zen. I really love Zen. For them, Zen is complete. You know, they've got their male Buddha, they have their male teachers, they have their most intimate connection with this practice, which I don't have. until I really came into intimate contact with women's teachings and a female Buddha, which actually Mahapajapati, the Buddha's mother, during the time from Buddha's lifetime, within the next couple hundred years, was actually called the female Buddha, and was written about, and the word for female Buddha is buddhi. So she was the buddhi, and that's the feminized version of Buddha. So, in the Zen curriculum that we study within the Blue Cliff Record and so on, there are some traditional koans and cases that do present women.

[28:34]

But the thing is, the women are presented from the viewpoint of support regarding the male monk's growth. They're not actually agents. So what I want to talk a little bit about is this problem that we have as women, as objects versus subjects. Now, both subject and object, these are both dualities in Zen. And in order to drop the duality, I would say that men and male Zen practice is about working on this notion of being the subject, the master of the universe. But on the other hand, we sometimes sneak through by the teacher can't find the way we're clinging to the subject because we're becoming the object in the matrix of the relationship. And we kind of disappear there and we can get away with it for a long time because Zen is aiming at taming this male subject, this agent.

[29:36]

So I've, in this book that I'm writing, have divided the women that we know about into Zen's women and the other part is women Zen. So in Zen's women, we learn about the ways that women are objectified in the Zen literature and turned in to support the Zen literature versus ways that they actually have a practice that matters. But in saying something about the women, I think in the reading that I gave you, some of you have to tell the others about it, but there was a statement in there about some 40,000 women in the year 1021 who were Buddhist by census. There were 40,000 Buddhist women in that year alone, 41,000 something. in the 8th century there were 50,000 Buddhist nuns as compared to 300,000 Buddhist monks.

[30:42]

So this means that they have always been there or sometimes in great numbers and we are finding out some of the details of how these women came to practice and how they taught. At times These women led their own temples, they gave lectures, and they passed on Dharma transmission to their own disciples. At other times, they subsisted on the scraps of wisdom gleaned from lectures at all male monasteries, denied any entrance to formal practice. And here's actually the number I was looking for, not 40,000, 61,240 nuns in the year 1021, and then they were about 15% of the Buddhist population. At times, the nuns' order dwindled to almost nothing. They burned their faces, they left their children, they walked across broken glass, and sometimes starved in order to find an entrance to this Zen practice.

[31:47]

They were not necessarily heroic in male terms, but they all personified female heroism, which is endurance, enduring courage, devotion, and ingenuity. So, with that I wanted to talk specifically about some women. Now, how many of you know about the eight special rules for nuns? Nobody, I was going to say, you should have to tell. The eight special rules for nuns at the time that the nuns order was established during the lifetime of the Buddha. the Buddha did not want to establish a nun's order. It's very interesting that he was able to see beyond the cultural restrictions of the untouchables because he included untouchables in the order, but he could not see beyond or was afraid to go beyond the cultural restrictions about women.

[32:58]

And finally, when he was asked by Ananda, who was trying to convince him to let women in, and therefore became the object of many Buddhist jokes. You know, Ananda was one they said was so handsome that women attained enlightenment just by seeing him. We wouldn't mind having him around today either. Nevertheless, I'm sure he would be the subject of many scandals in America if he were. In any case, when Ananda was trying to encourage the Buddha to allow women to enter the order, he said, can they attain enlightenment or not? That's really the question. And the Buddha said, okay, okay, they're in, but they have these eight special rules. And the eight special rules made the nuns' order dependent on the monks' order financially, made it dependent on the monks' order for teaching, and made nuns of no matter what seniority were junior to the most junior monks.

[34:16]

And there are at least three statements in the Eight Special Rules which say nuns cannot correct monks, which goes back to our big communication center, that they're really afraid of the harsh things that women are going to say. So these Eight Special Rules really hampered the nuns' order. This is why the nuns' order died out and why there were so many problems in establishing it and keeping it alive. And there are various places in history when the Eight Special Rules got dumped in favor of other government laws. And in those cases, particularly in China, the nuns really thrived. So first of all, let me say a little more about this object of Zen's women. You know, how many of you are familiar with the teachings of Rosabeth Moss Cantor on the roles that women play in organizations?

[35:26]

Nobody, okay. So, in organizations, because these are male-dominated organizations, women can survive as being a mother, If they're comforting and they're not challenging but nurturing, they can survive. As a seductress, if they have a powerful ally that they have some sexual something going with, they'll survive. And then they'll get fired. The other is the pet, who's kind of a mascot, who exists as a token and doesn't threaten the power structure. She's one of the boys and they take her along. And the fourth, is a category that nobody wants to be in, but it does happen to us in corporate life. The Iron Maiden, a woman who is defended through heavy armor, seen as powerful and uncaring. So what we have here is if you will play a familial role within an organization, then

[36:31]

you can play in the game. But if you won't be my mother, my sister, or my wife, then you're somehow threatening me because you're withholding this nurturing, this harmony-making stuff, this oxytocin-producing behavior that women are so well-known for. So with that in mind, we could look at some of the ways that Zen had for categorizing women. And there were five, as I saw, and when I looked through the literature, there were five ways that women showed up in the Zen literature. The nuns who could be men. This would be like Mo Shan and Liu Tie Mo. And if you don't know these women, you're going to have to form study groups, because I don't have time to go through all the many, many women, but Lori's got some literature that's coming out about the names that we chant.

[37:34]

So these were women that men would approach, and they were as tough as men, and in fact you learn nothing about them as women in the literature, but just that they embody the male spirit. So these are the Iron Maidens. The Token Nuns, and that one you'll read about in Miaoxin, Rai Hai Token Sui by Dogen, about the one nun who was so competent that they gave her a role, a leading role in the monastery. And she was the one who greeted the 17 monks, and the 17 monks were having an argument. They came to see her teacher, but they were having an argument that she overheard because she was in charge of hospitality, and she somehow ran the business end of the monastery. And she overheard them having this argument about the Sixth Patriarch's answer to the question, when you see the flag, is the flag moving, is the wind moving?

[38:37]

And the Sixth Patriarch said, it's your mind moving. And she's the one who came out and said, you guys are so full of it. You know, you're a disgrace, you're wandering around wearing out your sandals and you have nothing to say. And they said, oh, please teach us. And she said, the flag doesn't move, the wind doesn't move, and your mind doesn't move. And all 17 of them had an awakening right then. So she was talking about life moves, life moves. So this was an example of a token nun who was accepted and in some way put in a position but not was not challenging in any way to the institution itself. So then the 17 monks who came to see her went on and did not see her teacher, but bowed down to her and they'd have the awakening experience they needed.

[39:39]

Then there's the category of Zen women that humiliate monks. This category of women that you read about in the classic literature that is out there, the koan cases and so on. First, they will start out as mothers, and then they'll offer some help and nurturing in the form of tea or something else. But then, in the midst of it, they'll give the monks their kamapas. And the whole story is not about the woman's teaching, but about how the male monk, being so utterly humiliated by a woman, continued to practice. This is what the story is about. So one example of that is about the nun Shi Ji, who went to see Gutei, with one finger, Gutei. And this is also in one of the classic cases, so you can read about it. But she went up to see him and said he was on his mountain and she was on pilgrimage and said, this is found in his record.

[40:44]

There's no record of her. She said to him, say one word of Zen and I'll take off my hat and join you for tea and dinner and so on." And he went, couldn't say anything. So he started to walk away and he said, won't you stay? And she said, give me one word of Zen, show me your mind. show me what you've done up here in this hut all this time in the mountains." And he still couldn't say anything, so she left. And he was so humiliated, the story goes on to say, that he determined now to find a teacher and continue his practice more deeply. And the humiliation of this woman coming and showing him that he had nothing to say about, he had no way to embody his true self, was completely devastating to him. Then, We have the way of showing that Zen is something that transcends all categories and exists not just in monasteries, but outside of monasteries.

[41:47]

It's ubiquitous. And in this way, we see the tea ladies, the women who stop the monks by the road, offer them tea. For example, the story of of the monk who's been studying the Diamond Sutra who stops for tea. And this is sort of a crossover for, she's humiliating him, but This is just another example, and I serve many purposes. She's humiliating, we don't even know her name. I think we put her in our chant as Tea Lady. Tea Cakes, Moon Cakes. We got a translation of Moon Cakes for her name. But the story goes on about the man who came to her and ordered some tea. She said, what are you carrying in your pack? And he said, the Diamond Sutra. And she said, oh, you've been studying the Diamond Sutra. I'll tell you what, I'll ask you a question. If you can answer the question, you can have your tea and tea cakes for nothing.

[42:48]

But if you can't answer the question, you can't have anything. And of course, being a scholar of the Diamond Sutra, he said, well, that's a brainer for me, I'll take the deal. So she said, well, the mind of the past is non-existent, the mind of the present is non-existent, the mind of the future is non-existent, so with what mind will you enjoy these tea cakes? And we couldn't answer. So she said, well, you better go up the road and study with so-and-so. So this is an example of wherever you turn, a tea lady can show up and humiliate you or guide you to a teacher. And finally, the last category, the fifth category of women in the classic literature is the women who question the great masters as a way of showing the great masters' humanity, bringing out more of their personality, and showing that they also taught women, you know, so they were broad-minded.

[43:50]

I don't mean broad-minded, I mean their minds were open. So one good story about that is the story of Joshu walking in the woods and meeting an old lady. And the old lady, by the way, you should make yourself comfortable. This lecture is going to be a little longer than the 40 minutes, so you should sit with your legs comfortably. It's more like a class than a lecture. He met an old lady in the woods and he asked her what she was doing. She said, well, I'm gathering bamboo shoots for the great teacher, Joshu. And he said, oh, well, what will you do when you give them to him? And she walked up to him and hit him in the face. So that's one of the exchanges. And some of these exchanges are really wonderful. So these are the ways that women have been used to support the qualities of Zen being ubiquitous, I just had some teeth pulled so it's hard to talk, ubiquitous, and also the devotion of monks who are utterly humiliated by women and yet continue their practice.

[45:07]

So these are the kind of supporting roles that women have played. but what I've been writing about mostly, so that's one section, what I've been writing about mostly is what are the things that women did when they came together? In other words, rather than defining them as objects, as subjects, what is it they did when they came together to practice? What was different about the way that they practiced? So that's mainly what I gave you in the nuns' story in that little article about the ways that the nuns' practice differed from the monks' practice. First of all, there's information that has been lost that's very relevant to women's practice. For example, When we get zazen instruction, we're told to bring the energy down to the hara a couple inches below the belly button. Actually, nuns were instructed differently, and women.

[46:15]

They were instructed to balance the energy between the upper dandian, between the breasts. and the lower dandiyan, the hara, below the navel, because too much energy focused on the lower dandiyan, which is right in the area of the womb, will cause menstrual problems. I remember that when I was at Tassajara for a practice period. Of course, your periods come into complete synchronicity with the seshin. It's nothing you can do about it. So you're doing the last seven-day Sesshin. That was when I still had periods. So I'm doing the last seven-day Sesshin and I'm sitting on the cushion that I've been sitting on for the 90 days of practice period that I've done. And I had so much intensity and cramps that actually my cushion exploded. All of a sudden, during one sitting, Kapok started spraying out of the cushion. I'm not kidding. I mean, so this is an example of just too much energy down here in this expelling.

[47:17]

This is the expelling mode, where the prana is the downward expelling prana in this place. And from yogic practices, you know that. So that's one difference, and that's balancing. I remember talking to Meili about this, and she said, oh, I've been doing that all along. But I just found my way to do that. Nobody had taught her. So this is one thing that's been lost are specific teachings. Another thing is that we are taught to sleep in the lion's pose. This was the pose that the Buddha assumed at the time of his death as Parinirvana. And that is to lay on the right side. And actually, according to the yogic and Taoist traditions, women lay on the left side. The circuits are running a different way. So there are very specific things that have been lost from the teaching. So that's one issue. The other thing is that as objects who are cultivating a kind of appreciation, let's say, whether it be sexual or otherwise, we know that in India, the nuns' poems of enlightenment talked a lot

[48:27]

about their part in taking on identification as a sexual object and how they expressed it in their poems of enlightenment. The whole notion of women's sexuality and lust was worked on and expressed with these enlightenment poems. In China, which was not so out front with women as sexual objects, but more as objects who were pets to be contained in the house. Their feet were bound, right? They could walk. They were kept in separate women's quarters. In that case, the nuns, in working on without the use of psychology or any other literature on this subject, worked on this issue of their competence, their literacy, and expressed themselves through poetry, and a lot of that you can read now in Daughters of Emptiness by Peyote Grant. So, this is something that the women developed in China. And in Korea, it was pretty much the same story.

[49:33]

They were just objects. Women were just objects to be shuffled about. And the women, when they took on the convents, developed this amazing competence in running these convents and expanding them and improving them and showed great ability in this area. And in Japan, we're usually presented with a woman who's completely, it's almost a caricature of female qualities, you know, soft-spoken, completely deferential, you know. And these women were women of great power. And today, I just wanted to share with you my feelings about just one, convent, Tokaiji convent, which those of you who are going on the Japan tour will be able to visit. And Tokaiji is a wonderful example of how women shifted this helpless, deferential quality that was imposed on them by the culture and of course by our own biology, Seeking Harmony, to create probably the first shelter for abused women on the planet.

[50:48]

And this was done, let's see if I have the dates, maybe around the 12th or 13th century they established this temple. And actually it was established by aristocratic women. And it was very interesting because the aristocratic women couldn't really make use of this temple. because the network of power relationships was so strong that they couldn't get out of their relationships, but they knew there were plenty of other women in other classes who were suffering terribly in relationships, and there were no laws that enabled them to get divorces. Women could not initiate a divorce. up until the 19th century in Japan. So for 500 years, this temple existed as a shelter for women and protected them. And the way that it protected them was profound. There were times, you know, temples in general were to be a shelter, but as far as it went, you know, if the emperor said, I want that guy who's hiding out in your temple, they got in, but they did not get into Tokaichi.

[51:59]

of this temple were very strong advocates and used all their power of their aristocratic connections to ensure that they could provide safety for the women that they took in. It was completely amazing that they actually pulled it off. They also hired bodyguards to protect the convent. which is an interesting and creative use of Buddhism. They had some thugs stationed outside to keep men from trying to get in to get their wives back or anything else. But one of the founders, let's see, who would that have been, had been married to Hideyoshi, Hideyoshi's grandson, I think. And when the Tokugawa era began, it began with the slaughtering of all of Hideyoshi's heirs.

[53:02]

This is how you clean it up. It's kind of like our version now of ethnic cleansing. They would do family cleansing. It's like anybody who came out of this family, we're killing them all so that nobody can come back and avenge. So her entire family, her husband and many of her relatives were slaughtered. by someone who she was actually related to by blood. And he came and then she was hidden as a young girl. She was hidden in Tokaiji Temple and protected there. And when the first Tokugawa shogun came to her and said, you know, I screwed up basically. Sorry about that. I killed your entire family. Is there anything I can do now to make it up? This is, I think, sort of typically the Japanese apology, you know, after something really terrible has happened, I should come forward and say so. and then asked for forgiveness. And he came to her and said, is there anything I can do? And she said, yes, you can make sure that Tokeji Temple exists forever for women to protect them.

[54:07]

That's what she asked for. And that's why it was so protected under the law. I wanted to say a little bit more about Tokeji's founding abbess, who was also part of this aristocratic warrior class, and her name was Kakusan Shido, and she lived from 1252 to 1305. And she was raised with a number of stories contrary to the stories about the deferential Japanese women. She knew the women of her class, and there were very many stories of these very strong women and the things that they had done to protect themselves or their families. So she founded Tokaiji after the death of her husband. And after that, her son inherited his father's position and was a sponsor for the building of the Tokaiji in the year 1285. She entered the temples as founding abbess and her son and many members of her own birth family were assassinated because of fears about her son's loyalty.

[55:16]

witnessing this violence against her loved ones. This is not the same story I told you earlier about the violence against families. This was preceded that one actually. But we could see that asylum was big for her too. So first, Tokeji was generally about asylum, but then she had her son go to the emperor and ask if she could take in women. Her background of violent family history, coupled with her will to survive, really came out in what would be the equivalent of her Shuso ceremony. When she was given Inca, like a Dharma transmission, the priest at Ngakuji, who was her teacher, said, you know, now the monks can question her. And I have many examples of these questionings in the strong statements that women come up with. There's a wonderful story about Miao Dao, who lived in China during the 11th century.

[56:19]

And during her stepping up ceremony, when someone came to question her with an intellectual question, she, very aristocratic woman, said, how is it that you fell in the shithole before you even opened your mouth? So I should have turned it off. But these women were very strong and so we see that this was a quality that they were able to take from the Zen and embody themselves in a way that was not overly determined by their biology. So it's not that something's wrong with the biology, it's when we become the victims of it. So one of the monks came up to question her to expound on the record of Rinzai. during this question and answer period. And Kaksan, who belonged to the samurai family, always carried a knife on her body. And so, she took out the knife during the shuso ceremony, or this Inca ceremony, and put the knife down in front of her, and she said,

[57:29]

A Zen teacher is one familiar with the literary flowers in the garden of the patriarchs, and his business is to mount the lectern and discourse on books. But as a woman from a military family, I indicate my spiritual direction by placing a dagger before me. What need have I for books?" That's just one of the tasty morsels of the women's teaching. And we have just time for maybe one or two questions, because this afternoon we're going to spend some time having another discussion after tea, since we have this overly developed communication center. We will make use of more talking after tea. I did want to say one more thing before we do questions. I wanted to say that at the women's retreat we had at Empty Nest, I said we're going to talk about what was lost and what was gained by giving up convent practice.

[58:35]

So certainly what was lost was knowledge about specific practices. I never did get to it there. Knowledge about specific practices that supported women and their intimate ability to embody this practice that we do. Also, what was lost is the most dynamic environment we could take on for being the agent, the subject. We did this, something that we really experienced today. We did this. And before we could drop it, we actually need to know what it's like, rather than hiding out in this object role. And finally, the other thing that was lost is our own intimacy with a female Buddha. And what was gained or what has been gained in the West by practicing with men is access to first-class institutions which the women did not have access to because they were always impoverished because of the eight special rules and because of lack of support. Also access to a variety of strong practices and our ability to learn from these various strong practices.

[59:47]

Finally, what has been gained is our ability to enlighten men and enlighten our practice together. So now if you have a question or two, we'll do that, and then we'll move on. It seems like, I think what you're saying about the roles of women, that we're talking about what's We're saying that women did a lot of other things. And I think in the early sutras of the Buddha, you see a lot more roles for women. I mean, they're in the sutras because they dialogue with the Buddha, but there's a lot more variety there. I'm not... I'm not... I'm not... Right. Yeah, there are many things to flesh out our imagination.

[60:51]

Yeah, there is some material in the Buddhist sutras about women and their abilities as psychics, and the most learned, and the most this and the most that. There is also the most god-awful language about women, supposedly attributed... But, I mean, there's just so much about women arguing with the kings and the queens, and they were practitioners. Right, right, there's lots... There were sincere practitioners who presented Absolutely, right, so I was focusing more on the Zen, but yes, there's lots more, and especially in other traditions too, not just in the Zen tradition, but we should expand, not just to Zen, but look at the early Buddhist women, and Ma Dipa in the Theravadan tradition is a fabulous example, and the others, even more contemporary, Cave in the Snow in the Tibetan tradition, so there's lots of examples outside of the Zen tradition, yes. I heard that Bodhidharma's teacher was a woman. You know, I'm not sure where you heard that, but I had a Korean teacher come to my place and make this statement.

[61:59]

But I think it was a translation problem, because Hanyatar was not a woman. But I think what he was trying to say was that Bodhidharma had a woman studying under him. Well, it was a woman priest in Atasahara, and she said, in Korea, In the Korean Zen tradition, they believe that Bodhidharma is teacher. Yeah, so I wasn't sure when he made that statement whether that was something they believed or whether it was mistranslation, so you're clarifying that. Yes, did you have something to say about that? Okay, so let's just finish that. Yeah, it's hard to know if Hanyu Tara was a woman or not. Because after he said that, I was trying to figure it out and could not find anything. There are places where there were women who, we can't tell that they were women. And there is in the Vietnamese tradition, in their chant of their patriarchs, is a woman embedded in there. But you can't, unless somebody tells you, you won't know.

[63:01]

So it could have happened. And then one of Bodhidharma's students, one of the main students, was a woman. Even in the case that presents it, it doesn't say, by the way, this particular one that inherited his flesh, that was a woman. So I don't know if that's because it wasn't important for them to distinguish between women and men, they were considered equal maybe back then, or, you know, I don't know. I doubt that. Well, I mean, why assume? Well, because there were rules about subjugating women to different laws that were not more inclusive. They were more restrictive at that time. But the fact was that may have been Emperor Wu's daughter, who was a student of Bodhidharma. And there are places where they do name her as the nun. And I think we have her in our chant. The thing is, and this is something I learned from Miriam Levering, that they talk about the marrow and the bones and the body and the flesh. She was downgraded.

[64:01]

In other words, in the beginning, all of the four responses to Bodhidharma were equal, but as it went through historically, they said, this one is the one, this is my heir, this is his heir, as they created the history, and then they downgraded her response. The marrow was the one that got it. Right, according to later iterations, but earlier translations don't dismiss the three and leave the one, they include all four. So this is one of the things that happens with women who are Dharma heirs of important teachers. At the time that they pass on the transmission, they may be equivalent, but when they rewrote the history, they were pushed out, and the male In fact, if you look right now in America, I will challenge you to show me a temple where a male teacher passed on his temple to a female disciple, and it worked. Now just tell me one.

[65:04]

No. It went to Bernie. Yes. He didn't give it to Wendy. Moizumi gave it to somebody else. And because the other guy screwed up so badly, he called Wendy in. So it wasn't a male patriarch handing it down to a woman. It wasn't his temple to give. I mean, Bernie had his own temple at that point. It's close, though. Another one was Kaplow, who did give to Tony Packer, but didn't work. I was told by followers of Kaplow that the men protested and would not follow this woman. Another one that almost happened was Dido, who was going to give his temple to Bani Myotai Tris. And since then, they've had a split, and so it will go to Jeffrey Shubin. So, even though Joko Beck was really the primary disciple of Maezumi, it went to Bernie. And if you start to read already, she's almost deleted from the records of Maezumi.

[66:08]

And this is how it happens. So it's not like it's changed entirely in the West, even though things are changing. Do you want to say something, Rhea? I was just wondering if you were to recommend one book about women and say what you would recommend. I would recommend Daughters of Emptiness by Bea Attigrant because I think it gives a lot of flavor for what the women struggled with. have read Women of the Way by Jico Sally Tisdale, which gives a nice history, and it's so beautifully written. She's such a wonderful writer. But the problem is that she makes up a story about all these women, and you cannot tell, even when she talks about discourse between the teacher and the female disciple, as if it's a discourse between them. No, it isn't. She's making that up, and so there's no place in her writing that tells you when actual history stops and her musings on this begin.

[67:10]

So I think it's a difficult problem because you can't really teach from it because these really aren't Zen words, they're Sally Tisdale's words, which are fine, but they're not what we would have from a Zen teacher. So that book, I think, is a good book to read, but you have to be careful with it. Yes? approaching Zen like a woman, or I can be a woman bringing up my dagger and approaching Zen like a man. And I'd like to hear a third choice. Well, the third choice is recognizing the compelling tendencies you have as a woman to drop them and to just completely embody Zen. Thank you very much. but don't skip the step, right? So this is the problem of jumping to the absolute before we actually explore our relative problems.

[68:16]

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, there's a really wonderful thing about being the head. You don't know what the problems are until people tell you. So you have to ask my students how it is working. And I don't really teach. I don't teach this much at my home temple. Every now and then I'll try out a talk just to see how long it will take or how it goes. But I just teach Zen there. And I let people invite me to talk about the women's lineage rather than teaching it. where I am, because I figure that being it, that's what's being taught. And I don't want to force it on people who aren't interested. I'm curious about the stories about the women who humiliated men. There are so many Zen stories of enlightenment encounters, including chopping off fingers. They're not called humiliating.

[69:18]

Where did this word come up in the stories? Of the monks' humiliation? Well, when the monks chop off their finger, that's an act of bravery and there's something in the Lotus Sutra that tells them to do this. But actually, the notion of being corrected by a woman started as early as the Buddha, when you see he put three of the eight rules in there are about nuns not correcting monks, because it's just you know, to be corrected by a woman. No, it didn't. But the concept that this was unacceptable, that women would correct men, comes up very early on. And occasionally you read of their red face or their shame after this experience of being corrected by a woman. So yeah, they'll say it in the records. Yes? The short answer is the Buddha was a human being, in my view, and I think we should talk about that more at the discussion and try to get back on our schedule in some form now.

[70:40]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ